The Politics of Norm Diffusion in Turkish European Union Accession

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JCMS 2012 Volume 50. Number 6. pp. 922–938 DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-5965.2012.02291.x

The Politics of ‘Norm Diffusion’ in Turkish European Union Accession Negotiations: Why It was Rational for an Islamist Party to be ‘Pro-European’ and a Secularist Party

to be ‘Anti-European’*jcms_2291 922..938

JOERG BAUDNER Bogazici University

Abstract The article will suggest a bottom-up approach to analyzing the impact of European Union (EU) conditionality on candidate countries. If requiring comprehensive reforms, EU accession negotiations offer domestic actors a legitimacy standard, external constraints and a focal point for electoral coalitions as resources in the domestic political arena. The Turkish case serves as a hypothesis- generating case study suggesting that domestic actors who are disadvantaged in domestic resources in these dimensions embrace EU accession, whereas domestic actors who feel threatened in their domestic resources adopt an opposite strategy. It will be demonstrated that the two major Turkish political parties adopted a cost–beneﬁt calculus in their position towards EU accession. The Turkish case is particularly intriguing because the positions adopted by the Justice and Develop- ment Party (AKP) and the Republican People’s Party (CHP), respectively, have been counter- intuitive, and in fact both parties have drastically reversed earlier positions towards EU accession and done so in disregard of the preferences of their core electorate.

Introduction The article will argue that an analysis of the Turkish case conveys a different narrative of the ‘transformative power of Europe’ as being much more indirect and subject to political conﬂicts in (prospective) candidate countries. The article aims at contributing to an analysis of the ‘politics of norm diffusion’ (Börzel and Risse, 2009) through the development of a bottom-up approach (see Radaelli, 2003) to analyzing the impact of European Union (EU) accession negotiations on candidate countries. So far, ‘persuasion’ (Checkel, 2001) and ‘conditionality’ (Schimmelfennig, 2008) have been analyzed as the mechanisms of the transformative power of Europe, with both clearly taking a top-down approach to the analysis of processes of change in (prospective) candidate countries. The Turkish case can be regarded as one of the most salient examples of change related to the prospect of EU membership in the last decade. However, persuasion and conditionality approaches would misrepresent the processes of change within state and society. The Turkish case suggests that the change processes induced by the EU accession process might still be strongly determined by the character of domestic power positions, social cleavages and, in particular, the interests of political parties.

* A ﬁrst draft of this article was presented at the ECPR joint sessions, 23–26 March 2010, in Münster, Germany, at ‘The Europeanisation of Political Parties’ workshop and at the workshop on the ‘Europeanization of Turkish Politics and Policies’ at Bogazici University on 3 August 2010. The author is grateful for the comments of the participants and of two anonymous referees and for the inspiring and pleasant stay as visiting researcher at Bogazici University.

© 2012 The Author(s) JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA The politics of ‘norm diffusion’ in Turkish EU accession negotiations 923

The mechanism of ‘persuasion’ has been identified in the interaction of individuals at elite level in a process of argumentation with western counterparts. In this process, actors take over values and norms motivated by the aim to belong to a European ‘in-group’ (Checkel, 2001). However, Checkel has elaborated on scope conditions for this ‘ideational’ approach and hypothesized that ideational influence is positively related to a more isolated private sphere rather than a politicized one and to the fact that the per- suadees have few prior engrained beliefs whereas the persuaders use arguments and refrain from exerting direct pressure. The case of Turkey clearly does not meet these conditions. EU accession negotiations have been strongly politicized, have met a well- entrenched Turkish state doctrine, and the EU has made it perfectly clear that accession criteria are not negotiable and accession countries ‘take it or leave it’. According to the ‘conditionality’ perspective, by ‘making the benefits coming with membership conditional on democracy, human rights and peaceful conflict manage- ment the EU has induced its would-be members to conform on these political norms’ (Schimmelfennig, 2008, p. 918). Accordingly, the Turkish case has been analyzed as demonstrating a boost for reforms after Turkey was given candidate status in 1999 and the decision was taken to start accession negotiations in 2005 (Keyman and Önis, 2007; Narbonne and Tocci, 2009; ICG, 2008; Schimmelfennig et al., 2006). The later resistance against further compromises regarding the Cyprus question has been explained by the lack of immediate rewards as accession had been put into question (Schimmelfennig, 2008). Moreover, it has often been claimed that ‘reform fatigue’ after 2005 resulted from the resistance of different EU Member State governments to Turkish accession, which made the EU seem ‘unreliable’ and ‘soured Turkish public opinion’ (Patton, 2007, p. 355). However, these analyses, which focus on governments’ decisions and public opinion, respectively, underestimate the role EU norms and constraints play in domestic conflicts and the political usage of EU accession negotiations. The Turkish case demonstrates that even candidate status is not a value ‘as such’ and has been strongly contested in the domestic arena as well as that EU-related reforms might be carried out even in the absence of short-term rewards when related to domestic aims. An analysis which links EU accession negotiations to processes in the wider society beyond the interaction at elite level (see Börzel and Risse, 2009, p. 13) points in the Turkish case at political parties as key actors for ‘norm diffusion’ and ‘norm rejection’ in the domestic context. Until recent changes (discussed later in this article), Turkish politics had witnessed a polarization of positions towards EU membership and accession negotiations. The moderate Islamist AKP (Justice and Development Party) took a pronounced pro-European stance, whereas the centre-left CHP (Republican People’s Party), herald of western values and secularism and long-standing member of the Socialist International and the European Social Democrats, took a Eurosceptic stance. Between 2002 and 2010, the AKP adopted a number of reform packages in compliance with core EU requirements; by contrast, the CHP not only strongly opposed these measures, but also filed numerous complaints with the Constitutional Court in order to declare these reforms unconstitutional. This article will argue that Turkish parties’ positions towards EU membership have been based upon ‘instrumental politics’ and will suggest a framework for how EU norm diffusion relates to domestic power and interests. The first part of the article will outline the argument that EU accession negotiations (together with European Courts and Council

© 2012 The Author(s) JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 924 Joerg Baudner of Europe positions) provide political parties with resources in the political realm, a standard of legitimacy in policies, external constraints in the domestic polity and a focal point for electoral coalitions in politics. Some actors choose to embrace these resources as they offer gains in the political struggle, whereas other actors reject them as they entail a loss of equivalent domestic resources. This is to say that European values are not attractive as such (as in persuasion processes), nor are they mainly accepted as the ‘strings attached’ to EU accession, but their acceptance by political parties is motivated by obtaining resources and advantages in the competition with other domestic parties and in pursuing own (possibly diverging) policy purposes. Rational choice approaches have been criticized for using an ‘as if’ logic (Checkel, 2001). In fact, this article has to rely to some extent on a plausibility probe as actor statements admitting to strategic decisions in matters of values and norms are rare but not entirely absent in the Turkish case. Three additional strategies will be adopted. The ﬁrst is process-tracing: it will be argued that strategic choices regarding EU membership can be traced back to clear reversals of earlier positions, as occurred in the case of the AKP after the ousting of its predecessor party, the Welfare Party, in 1997, and in the case of the CHP with the decision to adopt an intransigent opposition to AKP reform policies after 2002. Second, a brief case study of the crisis of 2007 and 2008, culmi- nating in the pronounced ‘warning’ from the military and the closure case against the AKP, demonstrates the invocation of external constraints. Third, an analysis of voter positions towards EU membership in 2002 will demonstrate the coalition-building strategies behind the political mobilization around EU accession negotiations which ran counter to the political preferences of (large parts of) both parties’ core electorate. The article will then summarize the parties’ strategies and recent changes, and the conclud- ing part will reﬂect on the scope conditions of different approaches to the impact of EU accession negotiations.

I. The Political Instrumentalization of European Accession Negotiations Standards of Legitimacy in Policies This section will set out the argument that EU accession negotiations provide actors with resources in the domestic arena and induce a ‘political instrumentalization’ of the position towards EU accession. The argument of a strategic calculus within a process of norm appropriation or rejection is based on the analysis of a ‘rhetorical use’ of norms as strategic resources (Schimmelfennig, 2001). The underlying assumption is that actors are not fully socialized and (many) norms are not internalized. However, the compatibility with accepted norms can be regarded as a powerful resource because invoking accepted norms can overcome the resistance by opposing interests. This article takes the argument a step further, by saying that the commitment to European norms may be the result of a strategic action based on a cost–beneﬁt analysis of their use to foster political parties’ interests in the domestic context. For this very reason, the durability of norm adoption is insecure. This by no means excludes the possibility that these commitments will in the long run develop their own dynamic and path-dependence. Whereas the institutionalization of democratic rules will strongly support norm stabilization, the ‘civilizing force of hypocrisy’ and ‘rhetorical self-entrapment’ (see Checkel, 2001) might also work

© 2012 The Author(s) JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd The politics of ‘norm diffusion’ in Turkish EU accession negotiations 925 effectively in the long run; the instrumental adoption of values and norms might be self-enforcing and might even result in an internalized commitment. However, without sufficient institutionalization there might also be a backlash in norm adoption due to changes in actors’ cost–benefit analysis and the availability of alternative domestic power resources. European integration ‘institutionalized a standard of political legitimacy that is based on the constitutive norms and values of a community’ and determines which political programmes are desirable and permissible. This ‘standard allocates different degrees of legitimacy to political aspirations, preferences and behaviours’ (Schimmelfennig, 2001, p. 63). That said, candidate countries have their own (more or less dominant) normative framework for what is considered legitimate behaviour and legitimate demands in the political sphere and decision-making process. Therefore, it is likely that EU accession negotiations provide a different and competing reference framework for evaluating the legitimacy of political aims. Accordingly, domestic political actors confront the standard of legitimacy on which EU negotiations are based as an external institutional resource or constraint. Political actors who are systematically disadvantaged by the well- entrenched domestic standard of legitimacy (for instance, national or cultural minorities in unitary states) have strong incentives to embrace the European standard of legitimacy, once three preconditions are fulfilled: European norms must be supportive of the interests of domestic actors; they must offer domestic actors an advantage in the political system of the state in question, or must be perceived to do so; and these actors must also be prepared to accept modifications of the political programme imposed by EU norms, possibly even against the resistance of important parts of the electorate or membership of the party in question.

External Constraints for the National Polity Another strand of literature highlighting the instrumental use of European integration is represented by the ‘external constraint’ motive (Dyson and Featherstone, 1999). From the beginning, external constraints have been considered one of the major functions of European integration for national decision-makers. National governments have used policy-making in the EU to create self-inﬂicted constraints in order to remove decisions from the national policy-making process, to get legislation through in the face of domestic resistance, to avoid blame for unpopular decisions and to obtain leverage to tie the hands of successors. Early examples range from the industrial restructuring of the coal and steel industry to the obvious aim of Chancellor Adenauer to lock Germany into the western alliance through its accession to EU and Nato (Dinan, 2004). In a similar vein, an application for EU membership subjects national policy-making to the Commission’s judgements on the candidate countries’ ability to compete in the European market and on their commitment to democratic governance and the protection of human rights and minorities. It also binds domestic policies to the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and the conventions of the Council of Europe. These external constraints are prone to political use. Actors might value EU accession negotiations as leverage to promote their own policy aims which are then framed in terms of EU standards or presented as fulﬁlment of EU accession criteria. Moreover, domestic actors might even proactively search for external constraints and try to foster the

© 2012 The Author(s) JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 926 Joerg Baudner locking-in of rules at the European level – for example, by taking cases to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) or the ECtHR or by drawing the attention of EU actors to domestic shortcomings. Whereas the commitment to EU accession creates ‘self-inﬂicted’ external constraints, these may also contrast to (systems of) domestic constraints which have locked-in policy paths and have excluded other policy options, typically as obstacles for political and economic liberalization. In not fully consolidated democratic systems it is the military which has the power position to impose constraints on democratic decision- making (McLaren, 2008). However, a policy-constraining role of the military and the acceptance of the external constraints imposed by EU accession negotiations are mutually exclusive. Therefore, EU negotiations offer new opportunities for disadvantaged actors with scarce domestic power positions and, at the same time, threaten the power resources of actors which have invested in their relation to domestic policy-constraining powers.

A Focal Point for Electoral Coalitions in Politics It has been argued that a ‘European identity’ is attractive for actors in accession states as it is associated with the access to an ‘in-group’ to which actors want to belong (Checkel, 2001). From the perspective adopted here, the value of an adoption or positive reference to a European identity consists in its appeal to domestic voters and social groups. EU accession may provide a ‘focal point’ (Goldstein and Keohane, 1993) and can be instrumental in creating an electoral coalition encompassing different societal groups which will beneﬁt from accession. An able political actor might use the aim of ‘becoming a member of the EU’ as an ‘intellectual shortcut’ for a set of policies which aim to satisfy EU requirements (or are presented as such) and as a ‘coalitional glue to facilitate the cohesion of particular groups’ (Goldstein and Keohane, 1993, p. 12). Whereas EU membership seldom produced political cleavages in EU Member States (Dyson and Goetz, 2003), a number of factors indicate a more salient impact of EU membership negotiations on politics in candidate countries, in particular in the early stage of their rapprochement to the EU. Candidate countries are most often required to engage in comprehensive reforms of the economic and legal system. Moreover, EU accession negotiations (for instance, Commission reports and Council decisions) are likely to have a high ‘issue salience’ in public attention (see Oppermann and Vierig, 2008). Therefore, ‘EU membership’ can become a reference point for a set of reform policies or (in the opposite case) the rejection of it. Political actors will judge potential wins and losses resulting from the opportunity structures of European accession negotiations in comparison to existing resources – in this case, the position in the domestic cleavage system and the potential to enlarge electoral coalitions against the losses caused by an EU-friendly position, particularly through potential conﬂicts with their core electorate and social base.

II. The Turkish Political Party System and EU Accession Negotiations This section will give a brief overview of the development of the Turkish party system before evaluating the resources offered by EU accession negotiations to its main parties.

Since the ﬁrst multiparty elections in 1946, the Turkish political party system has for most of the past been characterized by the competition between a centre-right and a centre-left party. The overall dominance of the centre-right in Turkey manifested itself in the long- lasting governments of Menderes’ Democratic Party in the 1950s, of Demirel’s Justice Party in the 1960s and of the Motherland Party (ANAP) under the leadership of Özal in the 1980s. The CHP, founded by Kemal Atatürk for a ‘benevolent’ one-party rule and relegated to the opposition in 1950, was given a social-democratic outlook in the 1960s and 1970s by the party leaders Inönü and Ecevit (Ciddi, 2008). However, the CHP was, as were all other parties, declared illegal after the military coup of 1980 and re-established only in 1992. In the meantime, the DSP (Social Democratic Party), founded and led by Bülent Ecevit, who had abandoned the fraction-ridden CHP of the 1970s, was dominant not only among the laic and left-wing electorate, but also in national politics. Only after the downfall of the DSP in the aftermath of the economic crisis between 1999 and 2001, the CHP re-entered parliament in the 2002 elections. Although the centre-right was traditionally more open to religious demands, the Islamist party mobilization challenged established party politics. After two Islamist parties founded by Necmettin Erbakan had been ousted (Taniyici, 2003), in 1996–97 for the ﬁrst time in Turkish history an Islamist party, the Welfare Party (RP), led the government in coalition with the conservative True Path Party (DYP). In the aftermath of an open threat of a military intervention by the Turkish armed forces, the Welfare Party was ousted in 1997. Before it was declared unconstitutional, close political collaborators of Erbakan founded the Virtue Party (FP), from which the more reformist AKP split in 2001. The AKP obtained a remarkable 34.5 per cent of the votes in the 2002 elections, after an economic crisis had thrown the governing parties (DSP, the conservative ANAP and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP)) out of parliament as they failed to pass the 10 per cent threshold laid down in the 1982 constitution. The AKP was re-elected in 2007 with 46.5 per cent and in 2011 with 49.8 per cent of the votes, whereas the CHP remained the main opposition party in a three-party parliament with the AKP and the far-right nationalist MHP.

Standards of Legitimacy The standard of legitimacy in Turkish politics has been determined by what can be termed ‘Kemalist orthodoxy’ developed by the military and state bureaucratic elites who made it a salient part of every form of public education. The cornerstones of the Kemalist orthodoxy were the principles of a unitary state, the division of state and religion, and the guardian role of the military as laid down in the constitution in 1960 and even reinforced by the constitution of 1982. Accordingly, input legitimacy was not only based on democratic decision-making processes, but also on the guardian role of the military. Policy output was only regarded as legitimate if it did not infringe the Kemalist principles regarding the form of the Turkish state. These principles served to ban 24 parties in the post-war period, ﬁrst radical left-wing and later Kurdish and Islamist parties, whose core demands run counter to what has been regarded as legitimate by state elites and the military (Taniyici, 2003). The point in time at which the leading part of the Islamist political movement turned away from its effort to use Islamist tenets as an alternative standard of legitimacy and fully embraced European norms can clearly be dated to 1997. After a warning by the military,

© 2012 The Author(s) JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 928 Joerg Baudner which presented in the National Security Council a list of anti-Islamist measures it wanted to see implemented (reluctantly accepted by the government), the Welfare Party was forced out of government and subsequently ousted by the Constitutional Court (Jenkins, 2007, pp. 345–7). Preceding its closure, Erbakan’s closest allies founded the Virtue Party, which subsequently highlighted its difference from the Welfare Party. Before the closure, Party leader Erbakan had judged Turkey’s application for full membership in the European Community as ‘treason to our history, civilization and sovereignty’. The foreign policy programme of the Welfare Party was based on anti-western rhetoric and references to an Islamist Right Order and aimed at establishing an Islamist common market and union (Kirisci, 2006). In contrast, the Virtue Party committed itself to secularism, defined as religious tolerance and pluralism, and dramatically changed its attitude towards EU accession when it began to emphasize the necessity of Turkey’s EU membership. Three public relations agencies were hired, and in defence against the closure case, legal experts drew arguments exclusively from the western democratic literature. Erbakan himself declared: ‘We became pro-Western because we do not want Turkey to go back to a repressive regime’ (quoted in Zaman, 9 October 1997). The party leadership took the case to the ECtHR and a group of party members led by Abdullah Gül conducted lobbying activities in Europe in favour of the Welfare Party’s case. Whereas all other parties protested against the decision of the Luxembourg summit to omit Turkey as a candidate country for EU accession, Gül argued that the EU decision was justified because Turkey had not improved its political conditions since it had signed the Ankara Association Agreement in 1963. Erbakan stated after the Helsinki summit that the Turkish government had to accept the human rights criteria the EU had established (Taniyici, 2003, pp. 473–8). The ECtHR approved the Turkish Constitutional Court’s dissolution of the Welfare Party due to the intention voiced by some of its MPs to establish a Sharia-based regime. It stated that ‘Sharia is incompatible with the fundamental principles of democracy’ and the dissolution may be regarded as necessary in a democratic society (ECtHR, 2003). The decision clearly set the limits for the religious ambitions of an Islamist party which aimed to be tolerated by the EU as complying with its legitimacy standard. Nevertheless, (potential) Islamist leaders felt that European backing would save the party from the threat of indictment and the AKP could base its attempts to roll back the influence of the military on European standards of democratic governance. As a result, EU accession was embraced as the guiding device and first priority for the AKP government, as Gül and Erdogan emphasized when they toured European capitals immediately after the AKP came to power in 2002 (Kirisci, 2006, p. 44). Accordingly, the AKP framed its overall government programme and the call for more religious freedom in the ‘legitimacy framework’ of EU norms and conventions and presented religious aims as demands for human rights and freedom of association. Any attempt to construct an own legitimacy standard based on Islamist values was abandoned. The identification with EU norms was given expression by Prime Minister Erdogan’s often-quoted statement that the ‘Copenhagen criteria’ would in fact be ‘Ankara criteria’ (Patton, 2007, p. 339). Therefore, the declaration of the aim of EU accession provided the AKP with a legitimizing element ‘allowing it to shake off domestic and international suspicions of an alleged Islamism agenda’ both by legitimizing the policy aims of the party as well as by placing government policies under the surveillance of the EU (Önis,

2009; Narbonne and Tocci, 2009). However, the human rights discourse adopted by the AKP left room for an interpretation that was not always in line with EU understanding, as the inclusion of adultery in the hastily reformed penal code in 2004 demonstrated (which was soon abandoned after the protests of EU representatives). In addition, norms which have been of less salience in the accession negotiations, such as social rights and social policy norms, were not as eagerly accepted and implemented. By contrast, the turning point in the CHP’s position towards EU membership came with the AKP taking over the government in Turkey. The CHP put up an intransigent opposition to AKP policies and focused entirely on the attempt to provide evidence to the Turkish public that the AKP has infringed standards of legitimacy even when it pursued reforms in compliance with EU accession negotiations. Upon becoming the major opposition party, earlier attempts at programmatic renewal and reform of the Kemalist orthodoxy were sidelined. In fact, Deniz Baykal had obtained the leadership of the CHP with a ‘New Left’ programme presented as a strategy to reconcile western modernization and traditional values. Having resigned after the CHP missed the 10 per cent threshold in the 1999 elections, Baykal returned to the leadership with an ‘Anatolian Left’ programme, which even employed ethno-religious rhetoric demanding a ‘return to our roots based on the realization that at the roots of social democracy is freedom in thought, belief and worship’ (Ciddi, 2008, p. 445). However, with its intransigent opposition strategy the CHP limited itself to questioning the legitimacy of the AKP’s reform projects and the very existence of AKP itself, at the same time defending every aspect of the Kemalist orthodoxy. The Turkey 2008 Progress Report of the European Commission noted: ‘The CHP referred to the Constitutional Court a total of 16 laws adopted in 2008, some of which were intended to introduce EU related democratization reforms’ (Commission, 2008, p. 8). According to one count, the CHP approached the Constitutional Court 143 times between 2002 and July 2009 with 24 ﬁlings being rejected, 84 still awaiting judgment and 35 pieces of legislation being annulled after the complaint (Today’s Zaman, 23 July 2009). The strict refusal to accept any amendment to the Kemalist orthodoxy was demonstrated even in rather technical questions, such as the establishment of regional development agencies (needed to qualify for EU pre-accession programmes in preparation for later structural fund programmes). The CHP claimed that the RDAs run counter to the principle of the unitary state as they would establish another layer of state authority and were unconstitutional. The Turkey 2008 Progress Report also lamented that the new Law on Municipalities devolving more power to the local government had been put on hold by an appeal of the CHP to the Constitutional Court (Commission, 2008, p. 8). The strategy of a comprehensive attack of AKP reforms as illegitimate bound the CHP to a rigid Kemalist orthodoxy (Ciddi, 2008). It refrained from any changes in its own party programme and even retreated from an earlier, more open position towards Kurdish demands in the 1990s (Keyman, 2010). Moreover, the CHP was very reluctant to co-operate in reforming the 1982 constitution, adopted during military rule and considered by the EU to include several illiberal elements. The European Parliament in its resolution on the Turkey 2008 Progress Report explicitly asked the Turkish government to ‘work on a new civilian constitution’ (EP, 2009, p. 5). By contrast, CHP ofﬁcials were quoted as having suggested that ‘if the AKP does not like the constitution, it is the AKP which has to adapt’ (ICG, 2008, p. 6).

External Constraints The crisis in Turkish politics in the years 2007 and 2008 demonstrated that political parties invoked domestic and external constraints, respectively, to reinforce their positions. As much as the later attempt to end the headscarf ban was an attack on the Kemalist standard of legitimacy, the attempt to elect Abdullah Gül as president of the Turkish Republic in 2007 was an attack on the well-entrenched system of external constraints to the Turkish polity. The veto of the president and the decisions of the Constitutional Court had been much more intrusive than in western democracies and had been strongly linked to the intervention and the extra-constitutional power of the military. Traditionally, the nomina- tion for president had to be approved by the military. Moreover, the military had a say in a number of institutions, such as the National Security Council, the State Security Councils and the Council for Higher Education, which for their part proposed candidates to be nominated for the Constitutional Court and appointed by the president. In fact, Gül’s predecessor Ahmet Sezer had, before his election, chaired the Constitutional Court that had ousted the Welfare Party. Subsequently he vetoed a significant number of AKP laws. Whereas the CHP counted on the intervention of the military and the Constitutional Court, the AKP explicitly and implicitly invoked European external constraints. The Turkish armed forces published a memorandum threatening to ‘openly display their reaction’ after they had already given a number of statements of disapproval to foreign policy initiatives (such as concessions concerning Cyprus) and boycotted the reception of office-holders in the presence of their headscarf-wearing wives (Jenkins, 2007). At the same time, the CHP charged that the AKP’s attempt to elect Gül was unconstitutional. In an immediate reaction, the Constitutional Court concurred that according to (a disputed reading of) a bylaw, a quorum of 367 deputies was needed to make a majority effective. During the election of the president, the opposition parties left the parliament building, thus making the AKP candidate fail the quorum. The AKP reacted by calling new general elections, which resulted in an overwhelming victory of the AKP (obtaining 46.7 per cent of the vote). Subsequently, Gül was elected president when members of the far right-wing MHP stayed in parliament, in contrast to the members of the CHP. In February 2008, the AKP passed an amendment to the constitution with a two-thirds majority in parliament that allowed students to wear headscarves at universities. Ali Babacan, then minister for foreign affairs, asserted that Turkey dismissed the headscarf ban in order to comply with EU norms. This provoked replies from EU officials, who denied having given such a recommendation (Gülmez, 2008, p. 426). The AKP had earlier attempted to involve the ECtHR by strongly promoting the case of Leyla Sahin in order to declare the headscarf ban incompatible with the principle of religious freedom. The subsequent negative ECtHR decision (ECtHR, 2005) clearly came as a disappointment to the AKP and also met some criticism within the EU. However, AKP officials still hoped that EU accession negotiations would provide support for their demands. An AKP official lamented that ‘the EU doesn’t mention the headscarf ban in its progress reports, saying there is no minimum EU standard. But there is: it’s not the case anywhere else in Europe! You can’t afford exceptionalism’ (quoted in ICG, 2008, p. 15). Subsequently, the CHP filed a case against the law abolishing the headscarf ban, and the chief prosecutor called in March 2008 for the closure of the AKP for acting as a ‘focal point for anti-secular activities’. In June 2008, the Turkish Constitutional Court annulled

© 2012 The Author(s) JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd The politics of ‘norm diffusion’ in Turkish EU accession negotiations 931 the law which had lifted the headscarf ban. However, with regard to the possible indictment of the AKP, EU Commissioner for Enlargement Olli Rehn made it clear that this would put Turkey in ﬂagrant breach of the Copenhagen criteria and might lead to a suspension of membership negotiations. Finally, ten out of eleven judges found the AKP guilty, but fell short of closing the party. The cut of the treasury subsidy by half was interpreted as a ‘ﬁnal warning’ by Turkish media. In contrast, in March 2009, the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission concluded that Turkish legislation and practice governing the closure of political parties are ‘incompatible with European standards’ and further reform was necessary, both ‘on the substantial and the procedural sides’ (Venice Commission, 2009).

EU Accession Negotiations as the Focal Point for Electoral Coalition Political cleavages in Turkey to a large degree still reﬂect social and cultural cleavages (see Lipset and Rokkan, 1967). The urban–rural cleavage and the parallel running cleavages between centre and periphery and secular against Muslim beliefs have been mutually reinforcing and have resulted in a deeply divided society.1 However, with the massive migration to the major cities and in particular Istanbul, the cultural and religious values of the rural periphery entered the cities. With the ascent of the AKP to government, the laic–religious cleavage became dominant and was symbolically dra- matized by the issue of the headscarf ban. Both AKP and CHP used EU accession as a symbol for a political mobilization which would cross-cut established political and social cleavages. Both parties adopted, after the turn of the century, a position which contrasted with the attitudes of their core electorate (see Table 1). The core electorate of the AKP, the parts of the population with middle and lower economic status and those with strong religious beliefs, was split on the question of EU membership. Although in 2002 the Turkish population approved EU membership by 63 per cent, among AKP and ‘religious’ voters the majority for EU membership was the lowest with 51 and 53 per cent, respectively. By contrast, the core electorate of the CHP, the strata with higher education and socio-economic status and low religious beliefs, clearly favoured EU membership with an approval rate of nearly 80 per cent. CHP and DSP voters opted for EU membership by 77 and 79 per cent, respectively (Carkoglu, 2003). However, the AKP, which had made EU accession its political priority, presented it to its core electorate as compatible with and even fostering the aim of religious freedom. At the same time, the party aimed at getting away from its traditional outlook as representing the ‘new middle classes’ of Anatolian entrepreneurs and the religious part of the population. It tried to remodel its identity and appeal to a wider electorate and in fact attracted the candidature of several conservative politicians and even some social democrats and Kurdish activists. The focal point of EU accession and the dem- onstration of adherence to ‘Europe’ helped these efforts and provided the AKP with the opportunity to reach out to parts of the electorate as diverse as export-oriented business and cultural minorities.

1 The centre–periphery cleavage has been modiﬁed by the successful economic development of some parts of Anatolia. However, Turkey remains one of the states with the largest internal economic differences in the world.

Table 1: Attitudes towards EU Membership (Intention to Vote in a Referendum on EU Membership)

In favour of Against EU No answer EU membership membership

Education No formal schooling 56 29 15 Primary and junior high school 60 33 7 High school 68 27 4 University + 74 20 6 Socio-economic status Low 60 33 8 Middle 65 30 5 High 74 21 5 Religiosity Relatively low 80 16 4 Middle 65 31 7 Relatively high 51 42 6 Knowledge of Kurdish Yes 71 24 4 No 63 30 7 Party preferences CHP 79 17 3 DSP 77 22 1 MHP 68 28 3 DYP 65 28 7 AK Partisi 52 41 7 Saadet Partisi 38 58 3 HADEP (Kurdish) 85 13 2 Total 64 30 6

Source: Carkoglu (2003).

Interestingly, support for EU membership in 2002 was the highest among voters of the Kurdish People’s Democracy Party (HADEP) at 85 per cent, and was above average among Kurdish speakers (71 per cent). In terms of geographic distribution, EU support is still the highest in the Kurdish regions of south and southeast Anatolia. In fulﬁlment of EU requirements, the AKP government granted Kurds more cultural rights, such as the use of the Kurdish language in public and education and (limited) television broadcasting. The strategy of the AKP to reach out to the Kurdish population was facilitated by the fact that its core electorate and the Kurdish part of the population shared the position in the urban–rural and centre–periphery cleavages. However, the perceived reliability of the AKP’s opening to Kurdish demands was certainly enhanced by the visible effects of EU accession policies. As a result, in the southeast of Turkey the AKP and the Kurdish DTP became virtually the only major competing parties, thereby relegating the CHP to the sidelines of electoral competition. Even more important for the AKP was the endorsement of EU accession policies by the highly inﬂuential Turkish Industrialists’ and Businessmen’s Association (TÜSIAD). The ascent of the AKP to government has often been interpreted as the emancipation of

© 2012 The Author(s) JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd The politics of ‘norm diffusion’ in Turkish EU accession negotiations 933 the new middle classes of entrepreneurs in eastern Turkey, the so-called ‘Anatolian tigers’. They are characterized by strong informal, religious networks and represented by the Independent Industrialists’ and Businessmen’s Association (MÜSIAD) of (mostly) Ana- tolian small and medium-sized enterprises. However, the difﬁcult relationship between AKP and established business associations such as TÜSIAD (based on the large compa- nies residing in Istanbul and the Marmara region and ‘a major force in civil society’) also clearly improved (Önis, 2009). Export-oriented Turkish business massively campaigned in favour of EU accession and TÜSIAD’s reports became supportive of the AKP government (Ugur andYankaya, 2008), and in some respects even more positive than MÜSIAD’s statements (Keyman and Önis, 2007). By contrast, the CHP chose a populist anti-European strategy based on ‘defensive nationalism’ (Önis, 2009). Although it stressed that is was in principle in favour of Turkish EU accession, it resisted nearly all of the reforms carried out by the AKP and what it considered to be external pressure on Turkey. With regard to the pro-EU attitude of their electorate, the CHP engaged in a nationalist discourse arguing that the EU demands much more from Turkey than from other candidates without any serious intention to consent to Turkish accession; the AKP agreements with the EU would put Turkey in an inferior position and render it an eternal candidate (see Gülmez, 2008, pp. 428–9; Ciddi, 2008).2 Moreover, the CHP portrayed the concessions of the AKP government as bordering on national treason. At the beginning of Turkey’s accession negotiations with the EU, Baykal called upon the government to walk away from the negotiating table and the CHP’s shadow foreign minister, Onur Öymen, stated that the adoption of the Annan Plan was effectively ‘selling’ Cyprus and losing it as the Ottomans lost Crete (ICG, 2008). The CHP also voiced the strongest opposition against the change or abolition of Article 301 of the constitution, the incrimination of ‘offence against Turkishness’ – a paragraph which served to bring a number of critical authors to court, much to the dismay of the European Social Democrats (Narbonne and Tocci, 2009). Although the unqualiﬁed embracing of the Kemalist orthodoxy strongly limited the CHP’s electoral chances among religious and Kurdish voters, the CHP’s populist anti-EU strategy still implied a coalition-building strategy. The CHP attempted to reach out to other parts of the electorate, in particular the less well-off strata in larger cities, beyond its appeal to the (traditionally pro-EU-minded) middle and upper classes in the urban centres of Turkey (Ciddi, 2008). Overall, Baykal’s strategic move was comparatively successful in that the party became, after the downfall of the DSP, the representative of the ‘Kemalist left’ and consolidated its vote with 20.9 per cent in the national elections in 2007 and 24 per cent in the local elections in 2009, making it for the years to come the most important opposition party, competing only with the far-right MHP.

III. The Rationality of Turkish Parties’ Positions towards EU Accession It has been argued that party strategies in Turkey reflected a cost–benefit calculus of their position towards EU membership. However, the enactment of the strategic choices, which implied significant changes in the parties’ positions, was facilitated or even made possible by the fact that a highly personalized party leadership had considerable leeway to define

2 However, Ciddi (2008) claimed that in questionnaires and personal interviews with CHP MPs a two–thirds majority believed in the accession of Turkey to the EU.

© 2012 The Author(s) JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 934 Joerg Baudner party positions. Rapid party changes and low organization of civil society had limited inner-party democracy in Turkey. Moreover, according to the constitution of 1982 and the restrictive party law of 1983, national leaders nominate the heads of their parties’ provincial organizations and laws permit them to easily cancel the results of any party’s provincial caucuses that elected a dissident representative (ICG, 2008, p. 20). The AKP as a party with Islamist roots faced a standard of legitimacy and external constraints in the Turkish political system which made it difficult to pursue some of its core policy aims and made it vulnerable to the threat of indictment. The so-called ‘February 28 process’in 1997 demonstrated, as Özbudun (2006, p. 547) aptly put it, that ‘challenging the secular state in Turkey is a dead end’. At the same time, economic actors such as the highly influential TÜSIAD started to vehemently demand and campaign for Turkey’s EU accession (Ugur andYankaya, 2008). A new generation of office-seeking politicians not only felt that EU norms would be supportive of the party’s interests and conducive to empowerment in the Turkish political system, they also were prepared to accept modifications imposed by EU norms and discard many of the earlier Islamists’ demands.3 Embracing EU accession as an overarching policy aim provided theAKP with valuable resources in the domestic arena, an alternative standard of legitimacy, external constraints accepted by a large part of the population and a focal point for new electoral coalitions. Even despite the growing Euroscepticism among the population after 2005 (ICG, 2008; Schimmelfennig, 2008; Patton, 2007), the AKP could use the resources offered by EU accession negotiations in the domestic crisis of 2007–08, and even in promoting reforms in 2010. The AKP obtained a clear majority in a referendum on 10 September 2010 on constitutional changes which had taken up matters raised in the EU progress reports (see Commission, 2008) – for instance, bringing the legislation on the ousting of political parties into line with ECtHR rulings. However, most of these provisions clearly coincided with the AKP’s aim of further decreasing the power of external constraints on the policy-making process. Subsequently, the AKP government took an increasingly aggres- sive stance towards EU positions – most visibly in the conflicts with Israel in 2011 after the Israeli raid on the Gaza flotilla and with the (Greek) Republic of Cyprus which had started oil drilling in the Mediterranean Sea in an area contested by the Turkish part of Cyprus and Turkey. Moreover, the restrictions on the freedom of press and the rights of defendants have been increasingly criticized by the EU. The AKP government’s growing distance from EU accession and increasingly selective adoption of EU norms can be explained by a gradual change in the rational calculus in all the outlined aspects. First, the drastically decreasing public support for EU membership (after the resistance against Turkish membership expressed by Chancellor Merkel of Germany and President Sarkozy of France) made it increasingly difficult to mobilize electoral coalitions around EU accession. Second, the decision of the ECtHR in the Leyla Sahin case demonstrated that external constraints were not as effective as hoped and possibly expected in the pursuit of religious policies (see ICG, 2008, p. 5; Önis, 2009, p. 42). Third, theAKP was increasingly successful in using the state executive and, to some extent, the judicial system as additional resources in the political arena as demonstrated by the

3 By contrast, Kurdish parties did not embrace a similar strategy despite EU norms being supportive of national minorities because they doubted an empowerment in the Turkish political system and were not prepared to distance themselves from the PKK and its leader Abdullah Öcalan (see Güney and Bakan, 2008).

© 2012 The Author(s) JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd The politics of ‘norm diffusion’ in Turkish EU accession negotiations 935 disproportionate penalty imposed on the AKP-critical Dogan Media group (on alleged tax evasion). The so-called ‘Ergenekon’ investigations on one or more secret organizations encompassing military personnel, journalists and academicians planning to overthrow the AKP government certainly have a substantial core and have been explicitly welcomed by the European Parliament (2009). However, the scale of accusations and detentions raised widespread suspicion that they have been instrumental for the AKP government’s struggle against an opponent elite in the bureaucracy and the military. Fourth, alternative sources of legitimacy emerged with the sustained economic success that made Turkey, with a growth rate of 8.9 per cent in 2010, one of the fastest growing economies in the world. Finally, it was the coincidence of shifts in the domestic political balance, economic success and the ‘Arab revolutions’ that allowed the AKP to present itself as a model for economic development and for the reconciliation of Islam and democracy, thus elaborating on a new legitimacy discourse. The Eurosceptic position of the CHP after 2002 has often been explained as the tactical move of an opposition party. In addition, as leading Turkish political scientist Fuat Keyman has convincingly argued, the frustration over the AKP’s electoral hegemony led the CHP to adopt a ‘Schmidtian’ understanding of politics as ‘friend-foe-relations’ towards the AKP (Keyman, 2010). However, these interpretations reflect only a part of the process. It is argued here that the CHP’s stance was based on a more comprehensive strategy which reflected the character of the Turkish political system to provide powerful resources to the opposition as it could appeal to standards of legitimacy and external constraints against even a moderate Islamist government. Therefore, the CHP did not pursue a pure vote-maximizing strategy (clearly demonstrated by its poor election results in the Kurdish areas) but, by appealing to the Constitutional Court, it took steps towards a possible ousting of the AKP which would have dramatically changed the parties’ opportunities (and in the end, the AKP escaped its interdiction by only one vote). Facing both the need to establish itself as the representative of the ‘Kemalist left’ after the downfall of the DSP and the AKP’s challenge to well-established legitimacy standards and policy constraints, intransigent opposition seemed to be the safer option for the CHP leadership. The acceptance of EU norms and values as standard of legitimacy would have deprived the party of these resources and put its close relationship to powerful domestic actors at risk. The CHP would have had to make significant amendments in its legitimacy discourse and to renounce the option to outlaw the AKP; it would even have had to engage in a controlled conflict with the bureaucratic state elite. Moreover, the strategy pursued by the CHP created its own path-dependency as its Euroscepticism influenced its electorate which, in a reversal of positions, became notably more Eurosceptic than the electorate of the AKP. While a majority of AKP voters (53.8 per cent in 2008 and 56.7 per cent in 2010) still supported EU membership, only 44.1 per cent of CHP voters in 2008 and 48.2 per cent in 2010 did so.4 Nevertheless, there has been a gradual change in the CHP’s position towards EU accession and norms after Kemal Kilicdaroglu became party leader in 2010 and aimed at improving relations with EU representatives and European social democrats. Given the facts that, as a result of the Ergenekon investigations, the CHP had lost the opportunity to rely on the external constraints imposed by the military and the state elite and that the

4 Data from Infacto surveys; the author is indebted to Dr Emre Erdogan (Infacto).

Kemalist legitimacy framework has been seriously put into question, the CHP may continue to turn towards EU support and towards invoking EU norms. The seminal shifts in domestic resources may well be reﬂected by another reversal of roles towards EU accession and EU norms in the future.

Conclusions: Scope Conditions of Approaches to the ‘Transformative Power of Europe’ This article has set out a different narrative of the transformative power of Europe which portrays it as being much more indirect than in persuasion and conditionality approaches and as subject to its function in the domestic context of a cleavage-ridden society. Moreover, it accounts for the possibility (not foreseen by the conditionality approach) that reforms indicating the adoption of EU norms are pursued even in the absence of tangible rewards from the EU. The hypothesis generated by the Turkish case study is that political actors evaluate EU policies according to losses and gains in the domestic arena (in the dimensions of standards of legitimacy, external constraints and electoral coalitions). Such a cost–benefit calculus led AKP and CHP to carry out U-turns in their position towards EU membership and act in significant autonomy to their voters’ attitudes, however, without any significant direct influence by European organizations. Reflecting on the scope conditions of the approach adopted here, the Turkish case seems to indicate that significant policy and polity differences between EU and (prospective) candidate countries as well as an unequal distribution of resources in the candidate country will be conducive to follow domestic political strategies towards EU accession negotiations. For instance, it has been argued that reform-oriented movements and parties in Ukraine and Georgia have been hoping for EU support and an accession perspective which would have reinforced their positions (Youngs, 2009). Moreover, a comparison of the Turkish case of ‘political instrumentalization’ with cases of ‘persuasion’ and ‘conditionality’ seems to indicate that there might be stages in the accession process (see Table 2). In an open, undefined situation, often to be found in democratic transitions, ideational influence on elite members of the executive may be most effective; a bottom-up approach might have the most explanatory power for analyzing the long way to negotiations with the EU, whereas in the final stage of negotiations a top-down approach might explain best the interaction between a candidate country and the EU. Synchronically, governments’ actions might be better explained by conditionality approaches, individual officials might be rather affected by persuasion approaches and

Table 2: A Comparison of Scope Conditions for Different Mechanisms of the Impact of EU Policies

‘Persuasion’ ‘Political ‘Conditionality’ instrumentalization’

Politicization Low High Low–medium Incentives/pressure by EU Low Medium High National actor in relation to EU Individual members Political parties Core executive of executive

Source: Author’s own calculations.

© 2012 The Author(s) JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd The politics of ‘norm diffusion’ in Turkish EU accession negotiations 937 parties might tend to follow the logic of ‘political instrumentalization’. In conclusion, the ‘transformative power of Europe’ might have different faces; it seems to be fruitful and promising for future research to compare the scope conditions of different analytical and theoretical approaches.

Correspondence: Joerg Baudner Department of Political Science and International Relations Bogazici University 34342 Bebek, Istanbul Turkey email: [email protected]

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